


Try Not to Die

by failsafe



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Character Study, Multi, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 13:10:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12888585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: Is it possible to survive that place?





	Try Not to Die

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a really short first-person POV thing I wrote. I know a lot of people don't like to read fic in first person, and I'm not very confident writing it. However, it's just kind of me doing an internal monologue snippet thing for Slade.

The island where he found me was called Lian Yu. It was also the last place ASIS deployed me; it was the place where I had lost all faith in loyalty holding any sway away from the comforts of home. It was where I found a sense of purpose more immediate and real than anything else. And it was where I found the last thing I would ever have worth losing.

The island's name means 'purgatory.' The first time they explained it to me, I laughed.

_'An island with delusion of grandeur,' I said to a man I trusted with my life. Not just my life, but the life of my son, too._

_'Don't get too full of yourself, Slade,' he advised. In that moment, I don't think he had ever dreamt of betraying me as he would, less than a week later. 'You know the locals often know things we don't.'_

_'I've heard there aren't many_ locals _around,' I replied. How little either of us had known, even with all the information ASIS had been able to – or had bothered – to give us._

The months of learning not so much a new kind of pain as a new kind of anger crept by slowly. I watched as my friend became an object of hate. On the rare nights when I slept deeply enough to dream, my dreams were of two things – the son I no longer had any right to call son, after trusting him to such a man, and the man whom I desired to destroy above all else.

The means of escape devised by Yao Fei and myself were not the most triumphant or effective. We were separated and those plans failed. All of that planning, and it led me to meet him. It led me to meet Oliver Queen.

The soft, weak young man I met that day had baffled me. How had he, above all others, found me? It was insulting, in some sense. Whatever explanation he gave, however believable it might have been, even if my only previous ally on that dreadful place ha been involved, it remained an insult for a while. This only changed when Oliver showed himself willing to _try not to die_.

I had never imagined how important it would become to me – the most immediate purpose I had ever known, shamefully or not – to try and keep teaching Oliver to _try not to die_.

Even when there was respite from bloody struggle on the island, it still provided its own, quieter threats. I began to understand why those who had named the island might have lit upon such an appropriate title. The island was not hell. There were moments when one could almost find peace. The island, however, was a proving ground where all one's shortcomings were laid bare and tested and pressed until the island broke a person or forced that person to _survive_.

Many of those shortcomings were personal, and Oliver Queen had many. Some of those shortcomings, however, were physical, and Oliver Queen had more than a few.

She was with us by then.

_Oliver's skin was hot, and the first attempt at giving him the plant that had chased away infection for us more than once hadn't worked. It hadn't worked, partly, because the kid had vomited not an hour later, mostly water and bile. The thick, acidic scent of it was hardly noticeable – hardly – in the face of trying to force his fever down. She was always more patient with him than I was._

“ _You can't give up to this,” she said to him. Her tone was sharp enough, but her fingertips brushing back from the corner of his eye to his sweaty hairline punctuated it with a grace I couldn't have mustered._

“ _Maybe don't touch me,” Oliver rasped out, the first full sentence he had formed since throwing up._

“ _Quiet, kid,” I remember saying, reflexively bristling against the sound of his voice with a throat that sounded so stripped raw._

“ _Contagious,” Oliver insisted on saying. I went to get more of the water, to try again and to shut him up before he hurt himself again._

“ _Even if you are contagious, it won't matter. We live too close together to worry about that,” Shado said. Shado always had a fast answer for him, when he wouldn't be satisfied with_ not-speaking _. I knelt by Shado, and for whatever else we never shared, in that moment we were of one mind. I brought the water to Oliver's lips. I coaxed his lower lip to accept the mouth of whatever I had found to bring him water with._

“ _Drink,” I ordered._

_Oliver tried. He swallowed a few times. Oliver coughed, and as I pulled the vessel away before he spilled more of it onto his chest, I sighed a ragged sigh that sounded more animal than human. I am often at fault for that and no less since then._

“ _Malaria,” Oliver said without context or prompting when he had finished spluttering._

“ _Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. You just have to try not to leave us._ Try not to die _.”_

_Oliver closed his eyes. Apparently that was enough. I glanced at Shado and marveled at that ability of hers to force his cooperation. I shifted to leave the little bit of water left within reach of Oliver's hand. She cleared away from him, too, and we started to occupy opposite sides of our little living space. It had become a place that was nearly like a home, for a moment, and I should have been ashamed of it, but I couldn't be._

The island was a place where people came to be judged – by the sea, by the air and ground and poison in the veins of the trees. The island was a place that killed and killed and killed until the person you were when you came vanished inside the person you would be when you left. If you left. But that broken, ruined plane in that little place became a different kind of torment to me, in the end. It was a place where I could almost believe I was still a man I recognized. But try as you might, that island changes a person completely. In the end, I lost the man I was. I lost her – the woman I loved. I lost him – Oliver Queen. 

Shado's father, Yao Fei, often gave the same advice in his native tongue:  _Survive_ . I know that Shado and Oliver both tried to take it to heart. What I learned, though, is that there is no surviving that place. There is only  _trying not to die_ , and even that is inadequate. 

 


End file.
